


It Is Only With The Heart That One Can See Rightly

by mxnsterhouse (QueenTheatrics)



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: (sort of its more like heavy metaphor), Adult Losers Club (IT), Eddie Kaspbrak Lives, Fix-It, Flashbacks, Fluff and Angst, Getting Together, M/M, Magical Realism, im sorry, like so many, lots of metaphors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-24
Updated: 2020-03-24
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:02:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23302096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueenTheatrics/pseuds/mxnsterhouse
Summary: Once, long ago, there was a boy called Richie, whose heart was three sizes too big for his chest.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 9
Kudos: 64





	It Is Only With The Heart That One Can See Rightly

**Author's Note:**

> Please enjoy this metaphor-fuelled nonsense and then come yell at me about it on my It themed twitter @mxnsterhouse where i have a reddie au that updates like every day.
> 
> Title from 'The Little Prince' by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

> _Someday you'll grow up and then you'll forget  
>  All of the pain you endured  
>  Until you walk by, a sad pair of eyes  
>  And up will come back all the hurt - Bleeding Heart, Regina Spektor_

Then.

Once, long ago, there was a boy called Richie, whose heart was three sizes too big for his chest. Too-big hearts were born, not made, and Richie couldn’t fix on the moment he first knew that’s what resided under his skin— it had always, always been there. His heart was too big and it beat hard and strong, and from the moment he woke to the moment he slept, he burned.

Summer that year was fast and hot, like the furnace that was always inside of him. Richie, old enough to know but not old enough to understand, pressed fear-shaky fingers to the dip of his chest, where the steady thud-thud-thud of his heart bled through his paper-thin skin. He made jokes about it and smoked cigarettes about it and carved secret letters in a careworn bridge about it, and it did not help one bit.  
And so, as he learned what it was to be scared every day, he sheathed himself in barbs and thorns until the thorns turned inwards and damaged only him. A too-big heart pumping blood through the wounds he made inside himself. A too fast brain, speeding with whip-sharp accuracy towards a foregone conclusion. Voices, changing, changing, changing, disguising the only voice he didn’t want to hear.

And then there was Eddie, small and sharp like a shard of ice, like a piece of broken glass that got into your foot, worming itself deeper as you walked and walked and walked. Richie loved Eddie like that at first, like a sliver-of-glass niggle, until it became a firestorm that obscured his vision and stung his eyes. Richie’s heart was alight, and it was always burning for him.

Eddie’s mother told him about Richie’s too-big heart. Eddie’s mother told him he was small and she told him he was delicate and she told him not to leave her never leave her stay with her forever and ever and Eddie stayed. Eddie stayed for as long as he could bear to, because his heart was bigger, too, but it was soft and malleable like clay. Eddie’s mother spent years prodding and poking, working that heart into a shape she could inhabit, and she did, but never easily. Never without a fight.  
Eddie was small and he was careful, but in his soft, clay heart he was a wild, untamed thing and Eddie’s mother loved him loved him loved him but she would not let him live. 

Words are weapons. That was something that was carved into Richie’s too-big heart from the first moment he crossed Henry Bowers’ path. Eddie’s mother wielded those weapons more carefully, more cleverly, whispering them feather-light into Eddie’s ear until he had no choice but to listen. She whispered _that boy is dirty don’t go near him Eddie he’ll make you sick he’ll make you sick in your mind and you’re so delicate Eddie you’re so fragile_ and with each word, the vice grip around his heart squeezed a little tighter.  
But Eddie could run. And more often than not, it was Richie he was running to.

Richie and Eddie. Two live wires, meant to be kept apart, colliding again and again. 

The clown knew. The clown knew about Richie’s too big heart and weaponised it and it wormed itself into his bones, into the marrow, down deep where even Richie could not dig. Then Richie grew up and he forgot his trauma but the hurt stayed within him like a deep dark groove, and his too-big heart beat harder harder harder until his ribcage threatened to crack. 

He built rooms in his heart over years, huge rooms with wide cavernous ceilings, all empty, waiting for Eddie. But somewhere along the way he forgot who the rooms were built for. So there was Richie, broken in all the wrong places, wanting something huge and unnamable that he couldn’t quite recall, and yet wanting it all the same.

—

Now.

Outside, light breeze in his hair, he sees them. Friends. That word sounds strange after 30 years, foreign and childish and barbed on his tongue. Ben gives him a smile of indiscriminatory acceptance and Bev... Bev gives him the saddest look he thinks he’s even seen in a person. Bev always knew about his too-big heart—knew it even before he told her, through tears, legs dangling over the edge of the bridge where they smoked on nights after school. Bev had taken his hand and placed it to her chest and under his fingers he felt the thrum of frantic, fluttering beats. Bev had been cursed with the heart of a rabbit, though when it came to fight or flight, she stood her ground every time. _I hear it in my ears sometimes_ is what she had said. _I hear it when I lie down to sleep. Those tiny beats, so loud. It’s deafening, sometimes._  
Richie had understood her a little more after that. 

He understands her, still, when he sees the bruises on her arms. She hasn’t tried to hide them since they met again, and he isn’t sure if she doesn’t care or if she’s just forgotten. Either way, he loves her with a fierceness that shocks him, because it’s been 25 years and change since he’s loved someone like that. He wonders if she can still hear the beat of her rabbit heart in her ears when she lies in her bed at night. Beneath his mustard yellow shirt, his own too-big heart speeds up. He wonders if he can ask her. Hearts of any kind haven’t been on the table for discussion since long, long ago.

They enter the restaurant in a pack of three, strong footsteps and strong footsteps and then reluctant, shuffling ones. Everything in Richie wants to see Eddie again and yet nothing in him, he thinks, deserves him, because he still can’t control his too-big heart and that’s before Eddie’s even back in the picture.

When the phonecall had come through, Richie had answered, spoken with Mike in a voice of remarkable, controlled calm, and then promptly bolted out of a back door and emptied his stomach over the railing. A migraine bubbled behind his eyes as memories slid back into place, not smoothly, but with teeth-grinding, screeching force. Richie wanted to scream. Richie still wants to scream, if he’s being honest with himself (and Richie is almost always honest with himself, if only because it makes it that much easier to be dishonest with everyone else). His throat feels raw, scraped open. He thinks part of him might have been screaming from the moment he left Derry.

And then there they are, two planets reentering each other’s orbits. Eddie, doe eyed and interesting, in a polo and windbreaker. Richie, tall enough to house the tangled growth of his heart but not strong enough to contain it. They stand on either side of the room, their friends and a table and 27 years between them, like two parentheses bracketing the time.  
Richie hits the gong. He says, “This meeting of the Losers Club has officially begun,” when what he really wants to say is _do you still run eds do you still run like you could fly do you still run fast enough to beat the devil_. He doesn’t say any of that. He says a lot of other things, things he regrets, things he wishes he could take back, things that chafe at the air between them like rough denim on skin.  
Richie’s never been good at not saying things he shouldn’t.

But Eddie. Eddie gives as good as he gets. Eddie shouts him down because he may have been small but he was always _loud_ , always took up as much space in a room as Richie just through sheer force of will. Eddie’s mother may have tried to make him small but she could never make him weak, and Richie remembered the sharp stab of Eddie’s words as much as he remembered everything else. 

Eddie’s face is lined now—still handsome, of course, still lively and expressive and Christ, those eyes, but he looks a little frayed around the edges. A little smudged up. A little less put together than he’d like everyone to believe. Richie wants to smooth the years away with the pad of his thumb. By his sides, his fingers twitch. He keeps them down.

Inside his chest, his heart, with its many empty ballrooms, has come to life. Lamps are being lit and grand balls are being planned because the sole occupant of those ballrooms is sitting in front of him, making more noise in five minutes than Richie has made in 20 years.

Richie can barely bring himself to look at Eddie. Every time he looks at him, he feels the burning expanding up though his throat, the beating like a marching band thundering through him. He’s surprised it doesn’t come rushing up his throat the minute he opens his mouth. It’s all there, in his chest. The reasons for it all. The distance and the clown and the third, unnamable thing, bigger than all the rest, that holds them in limbo. The thing that makes people go crazy. Richie _feels_ crazy, hot under the collar and ready to run anywhere but where he is, anywhere but where Eddie is, looking at him hotly under those dark, soft eyelashes.

Under the table, Richie digs his nails into the skin of his palm until he has a row of pink half-moon marks. It doesn’t do anything except make him ache more.

—

Deadlights. He sees Eddie. Speared, dead, dying alone. When he surfaces, he takes action.

And Eddie lives.

—

After. _After_. 

They go to the quarry.

Two men in free fall for nearly thirty years. Two men hitting the water at the exact same time.  
Richie's rib cage, flying open, his heart thundering like a stampede of horses. 

When they breach the surface of the water, Richie’s eyes find Eddie’s. A sad sort of smile, turned up at the corners, lining a face with too many years piled upon it. It hits him, then. The sorrow in this longing. Sharp edges. This kind of longing leaves marks.  
Richie isn’t sure that he hasn’t been marked enough. 

And then Eddie reaches for his hand under the water and grabs tight enough to bruise, fingers smashed between a hand smaller than his own. Richie can feel Eddie’s heartbeat in the tips of his fingers and feels his own heart, still pounding, beating in time with that rhythm. 

Because Eddie has wounds, too. Eddie’s heart, now that he is grown, is no longer malleable, no long bruised clay. Now his heart is stone, unbreakable. Now, after thirty years, he’s still full of love but he’s not soft anymore. He has baggage, baggage shaped like a mother he loved too much and a wife he didn’t love enough and the secret, the one he’s kept since he was still growing, since he was knocked kneed and clay-hearted, clutched in the hollow below his lungs. 

Still in the water up to their chests, still dripping, Eddie presses that secret into Richie’s lips with his own. Eddie kisses him like a desperate, hungry thing. Richie, who has spent a lifetime desperate and hungry, kisses back, and curses his telltale heart because he’s sure that any moment, it’ll send them both up in flames. 

—

They drive by the kissing bridge. Richie’s treacherous heart thunders in his chest. He tells Eddie to stop, pull over, come with him a minute, and inches his fingers along the railing until he finds the letters that he’d carved into the wood and into the door of his heart, 27 years ago and every day since. 

On that bridge, Richie tells him things, secret things, things he’s never told anyone even under the cover of nightfall. Eddie tells him secrets in turn, the details of which Richie’s heart, still treacherous, will keep forever to itself.

Back at the townhouse, they pause at the door of Richie’s room for a moment that seems to last the length of the lifetime they lost together. Polar opposites, forever magnetised, joined together by something like fate—Richie, with his too-big heart; Eddie, with his head that runs as fast as his feet; A chasm of 27 years, unbreachable, and yet suddenly breached.

Both of them, that night, dream of nothing at all.

—

Morning comes before it’s welcome, swooping in fast and heather-grey over the horizon. It beams in through the windows with benevolent fingers pulling them softly to wakefulness. Eddie turns his face to the light, to the heat, to Richie, beaming at him with a smile shot through with grief.  
“This is it,” Eddie says. Neither of them quite know what he means by that, but it feels like the right thing to say, the right thing to agree to. 

There’s a crackle in the air when they leave the townhouse. The morning has stretched out before them, almost infinitely, and they’ve made the most of the time now that they’ve finally got it.  
“Looks like rain,” Eddie says, lifting an arm to point in the vague direction of the horizon. Richie doesn’t follow his gaze and instead focuses on Eddie, on his dimples and his tiny smile and those eyes, trained ahead.  
“Might be a storm later on,” He agrees. Richie, who has always felt like caged lightning held in the vague shape of a man, knows a little about weathering storms. Everything Eddie does leaves him wanting, and he thinks that a single spark could set him ablaze. For once, though, he isn’t afraid.

—

_how’s that for beating the odds huh eds how’s that for making it what would your mother say if she saw us now if she saw you here with me  
hey trashmouth  
yeah  
shut the fuck up_


End file.
